Google I/O happened today, and I watched about forty minutes of the keynote live before I gave up and switched to reading the liveblog instead, because Sundar Pichai narrating a spec sheet for twenty minutes straight is not something my Tuesday afternoon had room for. Theres a lot to react to. Veo 3 apparently generates video with actual synced audio now, which is genuinely impressive and also exactly the sort of feature thats going to make the next six months of "is this real" panic on social media worse. Theyve rolled AI Mode out to everyone in the US inside Search. Android XR glasses are a whole thing now, with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster apparently on board to make them look less like a Zoom call ruined your face.
But none of that is what I want to type about tonight. Its the price tag.
Google announced a new top tier subscription called Google AI Ultra. Two hundred and forty nine dollars and ninety nine cents a month. Not a typo, not a one time fee, a month. For context the plan below it, AI Pro (which used to be called Google One AI Premium, because Google cannot resist renaming things every eighteen months) is twenty bucks a month and already felt like a stretch to a lot of people I know.
Ive been doing this blog since November 2011, and Ive watched subscription pricing creep for basically that entire span. Netflix was eight dollars when I signed up. Spotify was ten and stayed ten for what felt like a decade. Two fifty a month for a single companys AI tools, on top of whatever else youre already paying for cloud storage and productivity software and the fourteen other subscriptions quietly draining your card every month, is a genuinely different category of ask. Thats three grand a year. Thats more than my car insurance. I say that not as a "back in my day" complaint but as actual math I did on my phone during the keynote instead of listening to the next segment.
The justification, from what I can tell, is that Ultra gets you the highest usage limits, early access to stuff like Deep Think mode in Gemini 2.5 Pro, and Project Mariner, the agent thing that can go do tasks in a browser for you. Fine, I get that theres a market for it, probably developers and power users and companies expensing it, and Google clearly isnt pricing this for me specifically. But the existence of the tier tells you something about where they think this is going. A quarter of a rent payment for AI access used to be the premise of a joke about the future. Now its a pricing page.
Whats funny is the actual free tier and the twenty dollar tier both got real upgrades today too, and thats the part thatll matter more for most people reading this. Imagen 4 for image generation, a filmmaking tool called Flow built on Veo, more Gemini baked directly into Chrome. Genuinely useful stuff, priced the way software pricing has always worked. Its just that its sitting right next to a $250 line item now, and once one company puts a number like that on a page, the next companys $150 tier starts looking reasonable by comparison. Thats the actual product launch here, not the glasses.
Im not buying Ultra. I dont think most people reading this are either. But Id bet money that in a year or two the twenty dollar tier looks like the "basic" option and everyone got quietly nudged up a rung without noticing. Watch a thirty or thirty five dollar mid tier show up sometime next year and feel completely normal by then.
Anyway, the keynote is still going as I write this, so theres probably four more things theyve announced that Ill find out about tomorrow from somebodys recap post. Thats the other constant about I/O every year: you never actually catch it all live, you just piece it together over the following week from whoever watched the parts you skipped.